Linus Torvalds Wonders If Linux’s AI-Prompted Patch Flood Has Peaked
The Register writes that “The worst of the patchpocalypse may be behind us, according to Linus Torvalds.” In his weekly kernel update post, Torvalds said Linux 7.4 rc2 was a big release partly because it contained code he’d left out of rc1 because he’d been busy and it was already the largest such release in kernel history.
But Torvalds s … ⌘ Read more

(I’ve been a bit quiet lately, because I was still absorbed by this. 😅 Kept writing/extending that story from different angles and the whole thing grew from 120 to 260 pages. 📜 I think I’ll give it a rest now. 😅)

‼️ At 16:32:54 UTC 13 Nov to 01:12 UTC 14 Nov the infamously known Mills DC suffered an ~8h40m long incident that impacted all Ingress to my infra as well as several other services such as cas.run and mbox.blue. The cause is Vultr Cloud deciding between the 8th Nov 2026 and 13th Nov 2026 to break their GET /v2/instances API whereby ?tags= filter no longer works. This API is marked as “deprecated” on their API docs website, but not removed. The trigger was my own software/services performing VM claned using this API call and filter that no longer works all of a sudden. More to come on this soon™ – I’ll have to write this up as a longer blog post I think 🤔 #VultrCloud #API

Power Grids On 5 Continents Pulse Every 60s. Scientists Think They Know Why
“ScienceAlert is reporting that researchers may have finally determined why, for many years, power grids around the world have been pulsing every 60 seconds,” writes longtime Slashdot reader fahrbot-bot. The likely culprit? Uninterruptible power supplies running routine battery checks. From the report: Every minute, some … ⌘ Read more

GTA VI Is Now Available For Preloading
Ancient Slashdot reader Lank writes: GTA VI is now available for preloading. The download weighs in at a whopping 210+ gigabytes on the PS5! Start downloading now and remember to take Nov. 19th off from work. “On Xbox, preloads for digital versions went live at 12 a.m. GMT on November 10 for Series X and Series S, which translates to 7 p.m. EST / 6 p.m. CST / 5 p.m. MST / 4 p.m. PT on Monday, Nov … ⌘ Read more

Norwegians Release FOSS GNOME Software for Music Recording, Internet Radio, and Cameras
ole (Slashdot reader #19,909) writes in about his free, Norwegian open-source music recording studio for GNOME called GarageJam, which he says allows musicians to compose, record, and share original music seamlessly on the Internet.
The latest release, GarageJam 8.0.1, is available in C and Pyth … ⌘ Read more

Python’s CVEs Triple. Anthropic Funds a New Security Developer
In the last year CVEs have increased 3x for Python and its package manager Pip, according to Python’s security developer in residence Seth Larson. “And the amount of malware published and removed from the Python Package Index (PyPI) is up 60%.” Securing Python’s ecosystem is getting more complex, he writes, especially given “the evolving role of … ⌘ Read more

Aaron Swartz Would’ve Been 40 Today. His ‘Legacy Lives On’ Says FSF
“Aaron Swartz would have turned forty this year,” writes FSF deputy director Sean O’Brien. “November 8 is Aaron Swartz Day, when we remember a pioneer of free software and information sharing whose contributions helped shape the modern internet.”

The Internet Archive will host a hackathon Sunday in San Francisco celebrating Aaron’s Swartz’s li … ⌘ Read more

OpenAI Responds to US Midterm Elections With New Commitment to Communities
“OpenAI has published a new National Community Compact and Compute Campus Policy Blueprint, apparently in response to the Blue Wave Midterm Elections,” writes ancient Slashdot reader Gilmoure. “Instead of moving into communities like a juggernaut, they say they will be dangling friendly carrots going forward.” Here’s an ex … ⌘ Read more

Microsoft’s Imagine Cup ‘Evolves’ From Student Competition To AI Startup Contest
theodp writes: That Was Then: The Imagine Cup competition, Microsoft explained in a 2003 press release, “seeks to provide students [aged 16-and-up] around the world with resources to use technology and Web services to solve everyday problems […] Imagine Cup is about empowering students to apply their creativity a … ⌘ Read more

Firefox’s New Mini Window Is Every Multitasker’s Dream
Mozilla is testing a new Firefox Nightly feature called Mini Window that lets users pop an entire webpage into a small, always-on-top window stripped of most browser controls. “The idea behind the Firefox Mini Window feature is simple: allow users to move a currently open tab (or a section of a tab) into a separate mini window,” writes ZDNet’s Jack Wallen. “Think of it … ⌘ Read more

AI Makes Linux 7.4 Merge Window the Largest in Kernel History
“On a Git commit basis, the Linux 7.4 merge window has been the busiest on record,” writes Phoronix,” with 19,671 commits since Linux 7.3:

As of this morning in Linux Git ahead of v7.4-rc1, the kernel source tree is up to 41,605,120 lines. That’s from 5,193,578 blank lines, 4,993,604 lines of comments, and 31,417,938 lines of detected code. Or nearly … ⌘ Read more

The Linux 7.4 Merge Window Is Easily The Largest In Kernel History
After writing this morning with some stats about the size of the Linux 7.4 merge window and the kernel’s source tree approaching 42 million lines, I was curious to run some numbers for putting the size of the merge window into perspective against the major kernel releases of the past 15 years. This shows the definite recent uptick due to AI/LLM activity… ⌘ Read more

Google’s First Data Center Satellite Is Online and Writing Poetry
Google’s first experimental space-based data center is operational after launching earlier this month, successfully running its Gemma 4 AI model aboard a satellite and generating a haiku about being in orbit. TechCrunch reports: The satellite, which carries four Google Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) and generates up to 1 kW of electricity, is … ⌘ Read more

Sam Altman Thinks Your PC Is Wasting Precious RAM
“Looks like OpenAI CEO Sam Altman wants to own all the computing resources and rent out terminals to the world as a way of propping up his business plan, now that debt-ridden AI companies are teetering on the edge,” writes ancient Slashdot reader Gilmoure. Tom’s Hardware reports: In an interview over beers with the YouTube channel Cheeky Pint, Altman said that local infer … ⌘ Read more

EMACS Turns 50
“EMACS, the mother of all editors, turns 50!” writes Slashdot reader dr_jerry, sharing a report from MIT Technology Review: Programming used to be a very different experience from the one we know today. In fact, the first programmers didn’t write code at all; the six women who worked on the ENIAC, one of the world’s first computers, at the University of Pennsylvania in 1946 did it by physically configuring switches, cables, and plugboards.

A … ⌘ Read more

X.Org XCB Co-Creator Praises Wayland’s Protocol Design
Open-source developer Jamey Sharp who is a longtime X.Org developer and co-creator of the X protocol C-language Binding (XCB) finally had the need to write a Wayland client and ended up praising its design… ⌘ Read more

@maurice-renck.de@maurice-renck.de Oh, snap! You just described most of the websites I’ve ever built (except I prefer terminal green over orange/yellow 😁).

Of course, I’ll be the first to admit that I have precisely zero design skills, I just like writing HTML.

Anduril Partners With Qualcomm to Build Laptops On US Soil
Longtime Slashdot reader fadethepolice writes: Anduril, arguing that its manufacturing capabilities are directly applicable to laptop manufacturing, is starting a project for a fully 100% U.S.-sourced laptop. The computer will use a Qualcomm Snapdragon SoC. I did not see any information about the OS, but I’m assuming that, given the type of processor, this w … ⌘ Read more

Firefox Tries to Bring Back the Internet’s ‘Good Old Days’
Mozilla launched a new ad campaign for Firefox that leverages early internet nostalgia in a bid to win back users who switched browsers. “Today’s internet tracks you, interrupts you, and asks for permissions it already took. But it wasn’t always that way, and it’s not how it’s supposed to work,” writes Mozilla CEO Anthony Enzor-DeMeo in a post on LinkedIn. “It’ … ⌘ Read more

EXT4 Lands Optional Buffered IOmap For Significant Performance Win With Large Writes
The EXT4 file-system changes were merged Sunday night for the ongoing Linux 7.4 merge window. The headline feature of EXT4 in this new kernel version is opt-in support for buffered IOmap usage that can lead to “significant” performance improvements for large writes… ⌘ Read more

AI Delivers ‘Zero Financial Payoff’ To Most Companies, Economist Says
“Despite massive investments and widespread hype around AI , the technology has delivered zero financial payoff to corporate America outside of tech,” writes the chief economist at U.S. asset management firm Apollo Global.

He adds that “there are still no signs of AI boosting productivity growth… [M]ainstream corporate America is pulling b … ⌘ Read more

What’s the point of writing text with UTF-8 formatting and always sticking to the boring-old ASCII set? 😃

Zoe Kleinman: PHP Is the Cyber Equivalent of an Unexploded Bomb
BBC technology editor Zoe Kleinman likens the recently discovered PHP security vulnerabilities to an unexploded bomb, writing, “The PHP story feels like the cyber equivalent of an unexploded bomb – I have never seen such a dramatic, public and global response to a cyber event that hasn’t happened yet.” Although no successful attacks have been confi … ⌘ Read more

EA Is Shutting Down BioWare
“According to a recent report by Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier (paywalled), EA has reportedly decided to shut down BioWare,” the studio behind the Dragon Age and Mass Effect games, writes longtime Slashdot reader atari_kid. Quartz reports: Chief Studios Officer Cam Weber and Chief Operating Officer David Tinson wrote that “over the past several months, we’ve taken a hard look at our business.” They said a small BioWare … ⌘ Read more

Government Websites Go Dark After Severe PHP Vulnerabilities Disclosed
“PHP disclosed two critical vulnerabilities in their programming language and urged web site operators to immediately apply the fix,” writes longtime Slashdot reader smooth wombat. “As a result, government web sites in Europe and elsewhere temporarily went dark on Wednesday as operators worked to protect their systems.” The Inde … ⌘ Read more

Professor Calls To Abolish Business Schools For Failing Society
joshuark writes: Professor Christopher Marquis makes a provocative argument about business schools: “We need to abolish them.” A 20-year business educator at Harvard, Cornell and Cambridge, Marquis argues in The New York Times and on LinkedIn that MBA programs sanctify profit-driven dealmaking at the expense of public life. “That’s not the institut … ⌘ Read more

Btrfs Brings More Performance Improvements For Linux 7.4
With Linux 7.3 there are some nice Btrfs performance improvements to enjoy while the in-development Linux 7.4 kernel is set to bring some additional performance optimizations for this copy-on-write file-system… ⌘ Read more

Wine Ported to OpenBSD
Wine has been successfully ported to OpenBSD, with developers reporting that dozens of 64-bit Windows applications now run on the operating system. “Even the Remaster of The Witcher 3 which released just last month runs, and runs well,” writes Thomas Frohwein, OpenBSD developer and ports maintainer. OSnews reports: The biggest limitation seems to be the lack of support for WoW64, so 32bit Windows software won’t work. Still, this … ⌘ Read more

LinkedIn Fights AI Slop, Now 40% of Its Long-Form Posts
“Even LinkedIn is getting tired of your AI-written posts,” writes CNN, reporting that the Microsoft-owned, job-oriented social media site “is upping its fight against slop.”
A report published in July by Pangram, a research firm that tracks AI content online, found that more than 40% of long-form posts on the platform were AI-generated, compared to around 30% on X a … ⌘ Read more

Releasing Palm OS Archive, Developer Rediscovers Working Virus After 25 Years
Long-time Slashdot reader ardiri remembers his days writing applications for the Palm OS. And he’s now released approximately 1.5 GB of historical Palm OS development resources, “accumulated during the early days of handheld computing and preserved on hard drive backups for more than 25 years… to preserve the tools and … ⌘ Read more

FSF Criticizes Raspberry Pi DRM Blocking RAM Upgrades
The Free Software Foundation “has never supported Raspberry Pi,” writes their deputy directory Sean O’Brien, “as it depends on nonfree software for the boot process, leaving an important part of the computer outside the user’s control.”

But they’re now decrying “an even more intrusive restriction on user freedom” — the binary-blob bootloader changes that limit your a … ⌘ Read more

Saudi OpenAI Employee’s Arrest Revives Fears US Tech Companies Are Hiring Spies
That Saudi national working at OpenAI and arrested by the FBI “has not been charged with foreign espionage,” writes the Washington Post, “and the U.S. government has not said whether he was acting alone or as an agent of a foreign government.”

But “there are signs that the U.S. government is exploring the latter possi … ⌘ Read more

Will New Documentary Make Theranos Founder Elizabeth Holmes More Sympathetic?
TechCrunch writes:

“Isn’t it weird that I, like, did a TV show about kind of a business scam, and you got in trouble for like … a business scam?” comedian and filmmaker Nathan Fielder gently asks Elizabeth Holmes.

One month before the notorious Theranos CEO surrendered to begin her 11-year criminal fraud sentence in 202 … ⌘ Read more

@aelaraji@aelaraji.com @movq@www.uninformativ.de I have mapped Caps Lock to be my Compose Key. :-)

cat ~/.Xmodmap
! Convert the otherwise useless Caps Lock key to a compose key, so e. g.
! non-breaking spaces can be inserted with Caps+Space+Space.
! https://adamsimpson.net/writing/compose-key-and-i3
keycode 66 = Multi_key
clear Lock

It’s really great! :-)

IMF Warns of the Real AI Threat: Debt
“Along with the dangers of continuing cyberattacks, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) reports that the threat of an AI market crash is putting the global markets at risk,” writes Slashdot reader databasecowgirl, citing the IMF’s latest semiannual Global Financial Stability Report. Here’s a summary: Three salient risks could trigger a sharp tightening of financial conditions and market turmoil. We … ⌘ Read more

AI usage at work has risen to absurd and moronic levels.

Entire dev teams getting dismantled and fired.

The people that work in accounting are expected to write their own accounting software (or rather, let AI do it). Same for marketing. And everybody else.

Former “tech nerds”, whom I used to respect, tell me that they haven’t read any code in months. Let alone written some. They tell me that “AI is really good now”, it’s the future, yadda yadda. At the same time, when I read their code, I want to scream and cry (and most days I do).

Virtually everything is vibe-coded now. Everywhere you look you get to see code that no human will ever be able to maintain. Huge system “designs”, expensive, slow.

At this point, I’m almost hoping for the bubble NOT to burst, because that might very well mean the end of this company (and, thus, my job).

There is no “exit strategy”. We completely depend on AI services now.

At the same time, I’m expected to implement ISO27001.

Everything is vague, chaotic, wonky, shitty, buggy.

People are actively working on making themselves obsolete, and they don’t seem to notice that they’re doing that, because they’re so engulfed with playing with their new AI toy.

I checked job offers, but it looks like every company is like this now. Maybe some are still a bit behind, but sooner or later, they’ll all be like that.

And the worst part is: None of this matters in the slightest, as long as there’s some idiot out there who buys our stuff. Welcome to capitalism.

People keep telling me that you can “use AI responsibly” and “just to some degree, just as a tool”, but they don’t seem to realize that this does not matter in capitalism. Companies don’t need “good products”. They just need to sell something. If you still believe that “doing a good job” matters and that “they still need competent people”, haha, my sweet summer child, nothing you do matters. You just happened to be needed in the past, but those days are gone.

The future is absolutely bleak – assuming there is a future.

Anthropic Bans Cruelty Toward Claude
New submitter CubicleZombie writes: Anthropic has updated its Usage Policy to prohibit “sustained and needless abusive or cruel behavior” toward its Claude AI models. While ordinary frustration, criticism, and adversarial testing remain acceptable, repeated cruelty could result in account restrictions. Anthropic acknowledges there’s no evidence Claude can suffer but argues that uncertainty about AI conscio … ⌘ Read more

Original RFC1149 Packet Up For Auction At Christies
Long-time Slashdot reader badger.foo writes: As some of you may remember, in 2001 RFC1149 (TCP/IP over carrier pigeon) was implemented.

Now one of the packets preserved from that event is up for auction at Christies. Direct link to the auction (current bid: USD 2600) is here.

This is a unique chance to own a piece of Internet history!

[![](https://a.fsdn.com/ … ⌘ Read more

@david@daiwei.me I use OpenBSD’s smtpd, which was super easy to set up. It gets a little bit more complicated these days because you also need a DKIM setup, so every outgoing mail goes from smtpd to dkimproxy and back to smtpd. And then dovecot for POP3/IMAP (has basically nothing to do with the other two).

I’m cheating a bit, though: I use config management on top, which means that all the UNIX users and mailboxes and directories are created by that. If you were to do that manually, it would be a huge pain.

Maybe I’ll write a blog post about this some day, just for fun. 🤔

JMAP? Never heard of it.

Apollo Software Pioneer Margaret Hamilton Dies at 90
“Margaret Hamilton, the groundbreaking researcher who helped create the field of software engineering and whose code helped land NASA’s Apollo astronauts on the moon to win the 20th century space race, has died,” writes longtime Slashdot reader Veeru. “She was 90.” MIT News reports: A computing pioneer who authored over 130 publications, Hamilton helped to establish … ⌘ Read more

Female AI Agents ‘Paid’ Less Than Males, Study Finds
Ancient Slashdot reader williamyf writes: If you thought the gender pay gap was not real, and that there were no biases in the workplace, think again: A recent study from the University of Limerick found that, in a VR office setting, AI agents – not even humanoid robots – that presented themselves as “male” were paid more per task and perceived as more “human-like” th … ⌘ Read more

Campus Censorship Wars, 25 Years After a Slashdot Q&A
Slashdot reader carlk22 writes: In February 2001, Slashdot readers asked Carl Kadie about censorship and privacy at colleges, and he answered. Now Kadie, who founded the Computers and Academic Freedom project at EFF in 1991, has written its history. In Part 1, Ohio State kicks a student off its network, then out of school, after a prank routes his “fuck you” into rec. … ⌘ Read more

Canadian Analysis: Permanent Daylight Saving Harms Sleep and Mental Health
“With the push to eliminate the twice yearly clock change, Permanent Daylight Savings Time has emerged as the favorite for most states and provinces,” writes longtime Slashdot reader kbahey, sharing the findings from a recent analysis published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal. Sci.News reports: “Ending the clock … ⌘ Read more

Particle Collider Experiment Recreates the Big Bang’s Primordial Soup - and Find Unexpected Pattern
“Physicists smashed gold nuclei together at nearly the speed of light and found an unexpected pattern in the particles…” writes Live Science.

“If confirmed, that pattern could help reveal how the hot soup of quarks and gluons that filled the universe in the first few micro … ⌘ Read more

This Virus Stole a Human Gene and Won’t Let Go of It
“Scientists have discovered a virus that is a tiny bit human, carrying a gene it stole from our ancestors about 100,000 years ago,” writes the New York Times. “And this virus may be using our own gene to infect us.”

Phys.org explains that it’s “both an important gene for brain function and a jumping gene capable of moving and inserting itself into genomes.”

BC200 is … ⌘ Read more

Physicists Identify ‘Octupolar’ Magnetism, With Implications for Quantum Technologies
While most magnets have two poles (north and south, or positive and negative), recent advances in quantum mechanics have revealed an “octupolar order,” writes Phys.org, where a pattern of particles in a crystalline structure “behaves as if it has eight magnetic poles rather than the familiar two.”

Now, … ⌘ Read more

President Trump Doxxes Senator’s Cellphone in Push For Permanent Daylight Saving Time
U.S. President Donald Trump “doxxed” a U.S. senator today, writes the Washington Sun, by posting his cell phone number “as part of a plea for his Truth Social followers to badger his Republican ally into making daylight saving time permanent.”

When The Washington Sun called the number minutes after Trump’s … ⌘ Read more

Researcher, Dartmouth Professor and Provost Face Accusations of Secretly Using AI
“The winner of the Nikon Small World in Motion competition is under investigation,” writes the photography news site PetaPixel , “after scientists accused Dr Ning Xu of using AI in his video.”

The Nikon competition is about showcasing the beauty, complexity, and artistry of the microscopic world. The entries a … ⌘ Read more

Someone Got Doom In an SQL Database
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Rendering Doom in a database is obviously a bad idea,” Lukas Vogel writes in a lengthy blog post explaining how exactly he managed to render Doom using an SQL database. OK, that’s not entirely accurate. The SQLDoom project uses a small Python client to handle input and output, drive the game’s timing, and display each frame to the screen. Behi … ⌘ Read more